


Magnificat in New Orleans

by Taabe



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Chromatic Yuletide, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 16:33:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2818841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the eve of Benjamin and Rose Vitrac January's first Christmas in their new home, at the end of a Reveillón, Ben and Hannibal have a run-in with a less peaceful holiday tradition, and they and Rose take a in young stranger in more need of help than even they realize.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magnificat in New Orleans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brigdh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brigdh/gifts).



The daub glistened in amber jelly. The cakes redolent of rum dripped whipped cream. The oranges fountained in towers.

On Christmas eve, at Reveillón, Benjamin January stroked the keyboard, and the music under his hands felt as airy and substanceless as meringue. Froths of Handel and syrup of Brahms.

Usually the austere patterns of a fugue could lift him out of the room and the noise, the sugar crystals and the undertones. Tonight or this morning the ornamented music felt too much a part of the scene.

He wanted cold stone against his knees. He wanted to kneel in chill darkness and lean his head on his hands and feel the beads in his palm.

He wanted candle flames pooling around the Lady Altar like phosphorus on sea water.

He had had to leave the church with the organ still rolling. Reveillón feasts began as the midnight masses let out — 2 a.m. breakfast in the town where no one ever slept.

When he had walked out of church invisible in the flow of people blessing and greeting each other, and the sound of bells followed him softly up the street, he had smiled over the mischief of the timing of that mass. If you can’t eat until afterward, put it as early in the day as possible.

But the calm he had brought out of the bare, shadowed sanctuary had worn away here under the candelabra.

He let himself imagine how it would feel to play “Bring a Torch Jeanette Isabella” as though the woman could hold the heat and swing with confidence. He saw Hannibal’s mouth and fingers twitch as a trace of fire raced through a chord under January’s hands and died away again.

He wanted to let himself go in Bach or in a beat a body could dissolve into. Christmas Eve had ricocheted into Christmas morning, and he wanted to be at home.

He would soon want it far more.

Voices blurred. He had gone past picking out phrases in the conversations, past easy commentary among the musicians about that man’s finances, that one’s aim or that one’s obfustication. His hands carried the music while his mind unhitched.

He was still in that state of mind when he found himself surfacing from a long-held note, D.C. al fine, Hannibal handing him a bottle sent by the host and settling the fiddle back into its case. He thought later that was why he acted as he did. They came out into the dark early morning, not talking. He was thinking of Rose at home, in her work room, where he had left her deep in an an investigation of refraction.

The air felt cool after the ballroom, and he jazzed Noel, Noel in his mind, thinking of her hands adjusting the flame of her bunsen burner. He felt released in the clearer air, in the chill that smelled of wood smoke and burnt sugar from the kitchen and rain. The chill kept down the ranker odors and left the air an earthy tang, and the music in his mind became the music he would play at home, the music he had wanted to play all night.

So when the street was suddenly full of feet slamming and slurred voices shouting and guns firing, he didn’t run.

Usually common sense would have gotten him over the nearest wall when the first shot echoed. When you can’t carry a weapon and an armed killing-drunk will get no penalty for leaving you bleeding in the road, the only good option is not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He stepped into a dark gap between buildings as adrenaline brought his focus up sharp.

Men were pouring around the corner of the house he and Hannbal had just left, where the lights from the party still shone, milling in the street and shouting in at the windows.

Hannibal, a few paces behind him, checked at his movement. He stepped out of the road but not in Benjamin’s direction, so that his lighter clothing would not draw attention to both of them.

Hannibal was surrounded now by men with stinking breath and shot guns pointed at the sky, their voices rough with yammering. The Christmas revellers had come calling on the gentry. They would have been drinking since midnight, probably on no food more solid than the raw eggs in the egg nog. They were staggering and shoving, firing the guns wildly in the air.

And one of them, January saw with a sick dread, had a boy by the arm. The man was white, unshaven, his clothes well-made but torn and fouled as though he had rolled shoulders-down in a gutter. The boy was lean, no longer a child but not yet spread into full growth, his hair corn-rowed and his feet bare. And his arm twisted up behind him in the man’s grip at a brutal angle. His face seemed drawn with the will not to cry out when the gun kicked as the man fired it one-handed.

No Wassailer would drag a servant with him in custody. None would have the price of one to begin with.

Somewhere at the front of the group, a leader was pounding at the kitchen door of the house. January saw Hannibal set down his fiddle in the shadow of the wall. As the house door opened, Hannibal’s voice joined the clamor, raised in his well-researched impression of insobriety. A house servant appeared in the doorway and a motion and shoving began toward the light beyond. As the group shifted forward, Hannibal staggered accurately into the man holding the boy. The man lurched and tried to lash out at him, and loosened his grip. The boy pulled away and dove toward the darkness where January stood.

As the man tried to lunge after him, January stepped out, calling in pretended anxiety to assist the flailing Hannibal and getting in the way of the nearest bodies that would have blocked the boy’s escape. The thwarted man was bellowing like a stymied sheep, but the crowd around him, intent on the house servant and the punch bowl, shoved against him. Jauary fought the current to Hannibal’s side and shoved the bottle he held into a pair of hands that grabbed at him, so they snatched at it instead.

And then he had a shoulder under Hannibal’s and was supporting him, as it seemed, out of the throng. The man with the gun fired through the press of men around him, and fire stung January’s arm — he heard another man curse and shriek. Hannibal pulled away, swaying between January and the swinging gun barrel as January caught up the fiddle, and they dodged into the alley Benjamin had surged out from. The unguided press of men got in its own way. As they ran, they heard the crowd hallooing behind them after drink, not men. Some hauled at their friend who fired his pistol into the air with a sudden, repeated savagery. They were shouting at him, “more where that came from!”

The Alley was short, and the far end ran out again onto a street where house lights still shone. January and Hannibal lept the gutter and slid into the one gap between the back of the house and a low shed-like outbuilding not wholly cleared of rampant vine growth. They dropped low against the shed wall.

Feet followed them, heavy and unsteady. The foul-mouthed gun-man and whichever men around him had popped out of the crowd like corks ran and lurched to the far mouth of the alley.

Benjamin leaned against the shed wall, his eyes closed to save his night vision and keep from reflecting any betraying light, his weight on the balls of his feet. He felt a tremor run through Hannibal, beside him, from fear or grim laughter. The feet scattered in the road, and they waited. Only the press of bodies had kept the gunman from shooting them in front of a dozen witnesses. January felt the fire like a burn in his upper arm and silently rued the damage to the dark wool coat he could not perform without.

The feet scrambled in the alley, and voices cursed without seeming to know what they said. The horde at the side door were getting restless as they drained the bowl, and the voices in the alley grew louder, arguing, many against one. And then the pack was moving. Feet thudded and joined the rumble of a hundred boots on the street, and the shouts and fusillade of guns went up as though they all had seen the fox, and the pack moved off all together toward their next house party.

January opened his eyes and found Hannibal looking at him. Their breathing sounded loud as wind in marsh grass. He stretched, moving to stand. And then a light, scraping sound came from the shed at his back and froze him in place. He pivoted silently to see the door in the shed wall ease open, widening the existing gap by no more than an inch.

He saw the flicker of a small, lean hand in an outsize sleeve, as it drew back into shadow.

He said softly, in his clearest school-room French, “Can we help you?”

And then he said it again in the Gambo French of the cane fields.

“There’s more like them out tonight,” he said to the silent darkness. “My wife” — he lingered on the word for the pleasure it gave him — “she’d be glad to see you. She used to have a school for girls no older than you. Or my sister. She has a boy about your age. We can give you a bed, something to eat.”

His head leaned against the wall, and as his pulse slowed the skin of his upper arm began to burn in earnest. He went on talking quietly, a sentence and then a pause, about his nephew and then, running with his own thoughts, about Rose. Somehow he could not now walk away. He was here, as he had not been when Artois, or when Rose, or when her students had — he shook his head at the thought and held his breath until he could speak steadily again. He was here now, he told himself. All he could be was here, now. Thinking of the people he had not been able to save. Talking into the dark. He felt the taut terror in the lean figure behind the door.

Hannibal sat quietly with the fiddle case over his knees, probably feeling that if January’s voice could not gain the boy’s trust, his own would add little. But he slid the zipper open on the case and cupped the fiddle in his hands to pluck one muted string, gently. His hands moved on the neck, and he muted the strings as he plucked one, then another. Then the slow, sweet wash and slide of a simple sea air, Da Slocket Light.

January pitched his voice to it, unspooling a memory of his nephew, Gavriel, bringing him rice when he was sick and alone in fever season. Lingering on his nephew’s quick, lively kindness, his eye for measurements and his way with his smallest sister, January felt the music shiver down his spine. Then he fell silent. A hand, an arm, a figure was sliding out around the door.

They reached January’s house together in a silent group. The boy had not tried to run, maybe too tired, maybe too aware of his vulnerability in the streets alone at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning. Maybe too sure he would be outrun.

Rose met them at the door.

Tension seemed to run out of the boy in his floppy clothes when she walked into January’s arms and kissed him, as though seeing her had made the boy feel that January might be in some measure who he said he was. She looked at the tear in the cloth, and January felt her hold tighten about him and her forehead press against his jaw. He turned infanitessimally to kiss her forehead and a gleam in her chestnut hair.

But she smiled at the boy over January’s arm at his brief introduction and freed one hand to hold out in welcome and draw them all inside.

January repeated their names and watched the boy start back at “Hannibal” in surprise amounting to alarm that Hannibal meant to come inside.

“It fits me as well as a Thracian helmet,” Hannibal spoke to him gently. “You should see my skill in riding at the head of 1,000 elephants.”

January grinned at him. “And I’m the favored younger brother of the right hand of Pharoah.”

Rose raised a quizical eyebrow. “And I’m a botanical specimen from the Aquitaine region of France.”

Hannibal murmured in Occitan, and Rose chuckled, a deep, throaty sound of pleasure. The boy looked up, and Hannibal, meeting his questioning look, lifted a corner of his mouth and translated with a rueful sincerity,

 _“When flower of the wild rose is seen_  
_and nightingales upon the bough_  
_smooth and renew with changed refrain_  
_their sweet songs, I too must begin_  
_sweetly to rearrange my own_.”

The boy looked no less bewildered, but he followed the pressure of Rose’s hand toward the door.

They left Hannibal playing the melting line of an O’Carolan waltz while the boy sat facing him in the living room. Rose came into the kitchen with January, and he explained in a low voice while she made coffee and he dished up the congris they had put together early on Christmas eve and set to cooking over a slow fire before he went out to perform and she went to her workroom.

Rose handed the boy a full bowl and sat down across the table. January drew up the piano bench, and Hannibal joined him on it. They began to talk of the evening, the music, the crowd, to give the boy a background to ease into while he ate with concentration.

January savored his own rice and beans a mouthful at a time, but he watched the too-thin hands as the boy dispatched his bowl and was ready with the ladel to refill it.

He smiled as he asked Rose how her night had gone.

Recently she had not wanted to tell him what she was working on. It had become a joke between them. He kept asking, because she seemed to enjoy finding new ways not to tell him — “designing a flying machine for ‘Der Rosenkavelier’” she’d say, or “calculating the velocity of a Pearl River map turtle.”

The lamplight flickered in her glasses as she turned her head.

“Encapsulating force vive in a lightening bug,” she said, and he heard the catch of pleasure in her voice. She moved her chair in closer.

She was watching their guest as consciously and unintrusively as he was.

The boy let the bowl settle on the table. He had been holding it gripped to his chest,  
as though once the taste of food has reminded him of hunger he had not dared let it go.

_He’s been afraid of hunger too long._

January remembered, unexpectedly and vividly, the coming in after sun down at the height of the cane harvest, when hunger had gone beyond emptiness and become a force, when the lack of food made his head and body ache.

The boy looked around as though committing faces to names. “Thank you,” he said. “Mr. January. Mrs. January. Mr. Sefton.”

“That’s all right,” January said.

Hannibal tipped his brandy bottle in a subdued invitation. The boy shook his head, a flicker of movement, and accepted a refill of coffee.

He squared his shoulders in the loose shirt. He looked up into January’s face and seemed to draw breath and answered the question no one asked.

“Marc,” he said, his voice controlled as a muted string. “That’s a lot to do for anyone, sir. I ‘preciate it.”

“You’re welcome here,” Rose said. She said it with slow deliberation, and she held the boy in her gaze.

“If you’ll stay tonight, we can all sleep and then talk,” she said. “It’s almost today anyway.”

She got up with the bowls and stopped by his chair and bent her head to his to say something meant only for him to hear. As January made to rise and follow her with the coffee pot, she motioned him to sit.

“I have something for you,” she said. “It’s almost ready. Close your eyes.”

The table lamp lit a few inches of table-top and coffee pot, as they sat drawn around it, out of the darkness in the room. Hannibal brought the candle from the top of the piano and set it by his elbow, and drew a reef of paper out of the fiddle case. He took up a knife to mend the point of a pen.

January felt for his guitar, leaning against the wall in the shadow beside the piano, and strummed. The hip-swinging “Jeanette Isabella” he had pictured earlier took shape under his fingers. Hannibal flashed him a delighted look but, unusually, left his fiddle lying. January obediently closed his eyes.

He heard Rose moving around the room with a chink of glass or metal. She touched the back of his neck in passing. The music swayed and flaunted in his hands, and she laughed.

He felt for the words of a Huron carol heard long ago, “Ehstehn yayau deh tsaun we yisus ahattonnia ...” and merged from it into Spanish flamenco, the rapid-fire flare of a Rasgueado.

Then, reaching into his childhood, he found carnival tunes, reels from the dances that went on from can’t see to can, the reverse of the hours a slave worked all the rest of the year. Today the field hands and the house servants at the big houses would have their day of rest, the only one they might have — sometimes stretching to two or three days, though they could never be sure that the whole would not be taken away if the cotton harvest wasn’t far enough along or the master chose to spite them. In many places whole pigs and cattle were spitted for roasting today, and he remembered the smell of the cooking, the crackling over the wood fire, when it was the one taste of meat he had in twelve months.

He remembered the voices of the children running through the big house shouting “Christmas gift!” — the bizarre inversion of ritual that let them wake the family to demand the “gifts” that would clothe them for the next year. He remembered the voices of the men and women on Christmas night, calling as they danced, egging on the dancers, calling to the music and urging it louder, adding their voices to it, exulting, lamenting.

He was playing a John Canoe call-and-response ballad, an improvised tune he had heard rehearsed for a month around the cabins at night, all those years ago, before the band of 100 men or more had carried the music from house to house on Christmas day, dressed in bright tatters, carrying a sheepskin drum a dozen men could beat at once and percussion instruments, metal and bone.

He began to sing his own variation in a glad inversion.  
_Got us congris_  
_So they say_  
_Got us gumbo box_  
_So they say_  
_Got us chicory_  
_So they say_

He heard the boy, Marc, taking up a beat with his hands against his knees and his feet against the floor.

 _Got us talking drum_  
_So they say_  
_Got us a fiddler_  
_So they say_

Hannibal lifted his voice

 _Got us a griot_  
_So they say_  
_avons caroles_  
_So they say_

They began to trade back and forth, playing with the words, the simple objects in the room, the music and language that had always fueled their conversations to remind themselves of what their minds held beyond the day-to-day slog in the grimy streets. The music adapted under Ben’s fingers, moving between structures he had opened to in need at one time or another, now a fugal theme, now the fourths of a spiritual, now the five-note African scale of a work song.

 _Avons le flambeau_  
_So they say_  
_Avons l’élan_  
_So they say_  
_Habemus jubilo_  
_So they say_  
_Ekhoume synedoche_  
_So they say_

Hannibal had his fiddle in his hands again and swung out on the bench to play without bowing into Ben’s chest, wheeling a descant, sweet, drawn out notes over the body percussion and the driving guitar.

Rose stood behind Ben on the bench leaning into him as he rested against her, and he sang up to her, eyes still closed,

_Got us conjugation_  
_So they say_

and they all joined in the refrain.  
With her hands on his shoulders, she chanted

_Got us combustion_  
_So they say_

He opened his eyes and saw what she had given him.

The room danced with lights.

They burned in glass jars, and the glass was clear — the color burned in the flames — deep rose from lithium salts, yellow from table salt, blue-green from copper, silver from magnesium, purple from potassium. They ranged accross the table and over the carefully covered top of the piano and ringed around him on low flat surfaces he guessed were boxes brought in for the display.

Around them, glass cut and melted, shaped into lenses, concentrated the light and refracted it, glowed with it like snap-dragon-flies, and sent the light gleaming over the walls and overhead in stars and patterns like Islamic tile.

And in an outer ring along the windows and over the mantle, orbiting like planets, liquid burned in glass holders, blue and amber from brandy. Hannibal’s bow hand came to rest, and he turned to watch as Ben looked about him. Marc sat on his heels, eyes wide.

Ben sat speechless while his hands on the strings tried to express the aching, astonished wonder of it. The wonder of Rose. The wonder that she could bring this into being. That she lived and stood behind him close enough to share a private joke, her answer to their longstanding debate, half laughing and half in earnest, about how to make fire under water.

That she had reflected her fire into the room.

He had always understood the solace she found in her work. But when he looked at her laboratory, he saw first the dangers — the combustible chemicles, the smoke, the heat, the saltpeter. He looked at her beakers and saw potential flying glass. And so it was dangerous, he thought, but so was a passion for surgery in a black man in this city. So had Rose’s beloved school been a dangerous dream, and so would it be again when they reopened it together, as he swore to himself again they would. He could not tell her to draw back from risk.

But he had never so clearly seen what she saw when she measured powders or set candles together to observe the flames, or built a telescope out of cardboard and glass and climbed a live oak to look out to sea. She had seen the workings of the world.

The light showered silver and crimson and sea-green accross the wide beams in the ceiling.

He looked up into the gold and green gleam on her glasses, the flame setting the planes of her face aglow, and murmured the words of Emilie du Châtelet, the 18th-century physicist whose French translations of Newton had first woken Rose’s passion for light:  
“without this breath of life that God had scattered on his work, nature would languish at rest ...”

She leaned to kiss the back of his neck and rest her face against his.

He turned into her warmth, his hands still caressing the guitar, and began to play again, a rippling, deep, rich music. It held the voices of a Bach fugue, polyphonic, one then another taking the lead. It held the fertile waters of the cipriere, the streaming Spanish moss, the resonant beat of a pileated woodpecker. It held the brisk movement of a woman honest, adamant and vulnerable in her integrity, translating Greek to drown out the slurred clamor from the tavern down the way. It held coffee in long damp evenings, conversations over outdoor tables about astronomical bodies. It held a growing awareness that not all bodies are astronomical. It held pain and anger and old scars that held bodies at motion. It held the laughter and loss and immediacy of bodies at rest.

Bass and alto, profundo and allegro, he played Rose and himself. His gift to her.

Hannibal, with a tentative grace, picked up his bow again. His fiddle came in, not in the bold shout of his John Canoe music, but warm, glad and retreating, underlying January’s counterpoint with a texture, a tangible harmony, a minor third, flavoring the sound with a rich sad sweetness and moving away as the guitar soared again.

January, absorbed in the feel of Rose holding him, Hannibal moving freely beside him, the strings under his fingertips, barely saw the lean figure slip from the chair to the floor, barely until a tenor voice came into the music, diving through.

A voice released in sadness, singing syllables like the field songs out of his childhood that might once have held African words, or might have grown out of the singers’ pain and anger, burning backs, blistered and bleeding feet, lost children. As he played the figure in the loose, rough shirt sang to the guitar, kneeling with back straight and head thrown back, arms crossed, face lifted to the light that ran over corn-rowed hair. _My soul magnifies the Lord._

And as he thought it, January realized what he was telling himself.

Not a boy still waiting to grow but a woman grown. A woman like Rose.

She was hardly more than 14. She was pregnant. And she was getting too far along for her loose shirt to hide it.

Now he knew what the man with the gun had thought he had captured.

A woman, like Rose. He realized the tears were running down his face and chest.

He remembered the night he had told Olympe he wanted to marry Rose. Sitting in his sister’s kitchen, cleaning out a lamp chimney with a twist of old newspaper, he had told her about the drunk Kaintuck man who’d accosted Rose in the street near her rooms a few days before, how she’d screamed and torn loose she and Ben had gotten safely back to her lodging, how she’d shut the door on him and how furious he had been with himself that she should have to live in such a place. That a new ugliness should batter against the old ones.

Olympe had given him a long, sharp look. No one could see clear through him the way she could, as though she were taking him by the shoulders, as though she knew how much more he could be when he tried.

“You’re standing with her in her doorway,” she said. “She’s shaking scared, so gone with terror she can’t talk or touch or see. And you are thinking _why does she do this to me._ Ben, think about that.”

He had set the glass chimney into its metal socket with exagerated care and silence, wanting to ask what she didn’t understand in this — how could he not want Rose safe away from that fear?

“You tell me you dream about attacking the man who hurt her,” she said, moving a knife steadily across the chopping block. She meant the first man, long ago. “I’ll tell you what I see in that dream. I see you angry at a man. I don’t see you loving a woman.”

He sat speechless, pressing the table hard against the floor. She slid the powder into a round tin labelled for sweets, guiding the flow of minute grains.

“When you were standing in that doorway,” she said, drawing the lamp to her. “Tell me what she was feeling right then.”

He tried. Fumbling, seeing Rose as she had held herself away from him, held herself tight to hold in tremors, breathing ragged. He remembered his own encounters with the gut-sinking of terror. He brought back to mind a vulnerability he had not felt since boyhood — the feel of earth under his chin and blood on his back and the sickness as he came back to consciousness, the fear even before he woke to the full extent of the pain.  
He remembered Olympe herself, a child barely walking, lying near him on rough corn shucks that stuck to them in the humidity while they counted up toward the next crash of thunder. And he remembered his father’s arm about them.

His throat felt raw, sitting at Olypme’s table. She adjusted the trimmed wick and set a match to it. The lamplight made firm lines of her collarbone and the cloth across her temples.

The set of her mouth no longer angered him. He understood the simple thing she was telling him. He had not been thinking of Rose. He had been thinking of himself. All that night he had thought of his own anger and loneliness, even in his dreams, and all the next day — until Rose came and apologized for her own natural fear to put him at ease again.

He walked home hearing over and again _she’s shaking sick_ in Olympe’s voice, and he saw himself standing with Rose in the doorway. He had been angry at her. How could she not have pulled away? And he felt sick himself at the thought that she could have had cause to fear him, even for a transitory moment. Even knowing, as he prayed she knew, that he would never act in anger toward her.

He had told Rose, the next time he saw her. Walking with her in the late evening, looking into her face in the evening light, he asked her “what do you dream?”

He looked up at her looking over his shoulder at the young woman singing, the firelight rose and bronze on her skin. She knew, he thought.

And Hannibal, letting his fiddle plane gently to meet her voice, running under, holding her up, answering her pain, he knew, too. He had probably known when he had put himself between January and the gun in her captor’s hand.

She held a long note, and a silence came like the quiet before the rain begins. Rose went to her and sat beside her on the floor.

Softly at first, the fiddle returned alone. January recognized the theme of Othello from the opera he and Hannibal had rehearsed for together, but it opened out, the proud movement of the general turning not into jealousy but into the channeled challenge of a spiritual, the call of a soul in anger, the radiant energy of the dance in the woods behind the slave cabins — passionate, individual, self-controlled. Ben, carying the rhythm, amplified it, tensed it with unexpected resonances, upheld it. They sat almost back to back on the same bench, giving the instruments room, while the aurora seemed to pulse on the walls. They played the light and knew it was their gift to each other.

Silence came back with the soft sound of the flames. Hannibal gathered up the long hair sliding out of his thong and said under his breath, _Tibi gratias ago,_ so softly January did not know whether he ended, _amicus meus,_ my friend, or _animus meus,_ my music, my breath, my soul.

The woman now sitting close to Rose blinked as though waking up. She put up a hand to blot the tears she seemed not to have felt until now. Not Marc, January thought, but Marie. And he guessed when she had come to the city, dressed in boy’s clothes, in the unrest and revolt at the plantation along the bayou in the summer. Maybe this life had been better, a scratch living working on the levee or in the market, maybe with people she had known from the old life. But the revolts had broken up a community that had been, whatever else it was, all the people she knew. And then she found she could not pass as a boy much longer ... and went out into the night on Christmas eve.

Hannibal wiped flecks of rosin from his fiddle with a cloth and set it back in the case. He stood, holding the fiddle in one hand and the papers in the other.

“Hannibal.” Rose came to feet, reaching out to him. He nodded toward the door.

“ _Carthago delenda est._ I am called home.”

“Stay with us,” she said. “It’s Christmas morning.”

Outside the window, the sky showed indigo in the first faint light.

“This is yours,” he said, and handed her one sheet of paper.

 _Athene, who wakes fire in the core of metal_  
_to learn its nature, grey-eyed lady_  
_in you experiment is experience_ …

She stood still, a candle flame close by her cheek, holding up the paper. She read the first lines aloud and then fell silent, reading. January, watching, thought he could hear those words as they might be set to music.

“I promised you a poem once,” Hannibal said, and stepped away from her, leaving her space to read it.

“And these are yours,” he said.

Kneeling beside Marie, at a quiet distance, he held out the two sheets he had written earlier. She held them to the light of a glowing red globe above her head, and then she looked at Rose. And Rose, knowing she could not read, looked over her shoulder and told her what they were.

“They’re your papers,” she said, “proving you’re free. One for a woman, and one for a boy, so you get to choose. He can make you more copies. It’s all right.”

Hannibal looked tactfully away from her trembling.

“Ma belle,” he said, “Be not afraid. _He has filled the hungry with good things._ If God can do so much, this is a small thing. I will do what I can for you, and I will not disturb you.”

He withdrew again toward the door, and Rose caught his sleeve. He answered her smile, but he said with bitterness, “It seems a small thing, to set against so many wrongs.”

“Not to her.”

He said, with a sad acknowledgement, “Christmas gift?”

Rose bowed to him, supple as a Marquis, and lifted his hand to her lips, and kissed it.

“Stay with us,” she said.

They gave Marie the bed. They found blankets for Hannibal and themselves, and improvised pillows and what comfort they could. Hannibal retired to the kitchen, near the stove, and Ben and Rose stretched out together in the central room with the lights burning overhead.

He stroked her skin, her shoulder, arm, hip close against him, and murmured to her, “What do you dream?”

She slid her hands up his bare shoulders, circling his feet with hers, close against him all along the length of their bodies.

“Of you seeing me in this light.”

“Always,” he said, his hands in her hair. “But lady, for awhile, may we close our eyes together?”

**Author's Note:**

> Yuletide introduced me to Barbara Hambly this fall, and I have tried to follow her example in learning about the time and traditions I'm writing about here. For John Canoe, holiday traditions in the South in the 1830s and especially among the slaves, I have principally to thank Stephen Nissenbaum's history, "The Fight over Christmas," and even more the narratives he cites, written in the 1840s and 1850s by men and women who had lived as slaves and escaped to the north. Judith Zinsser's biography of Emilie du Chatelet, W.S. Merwin's translations of Provencal poets, and a number of accounts, in books and online, of past and present New Orleans have helped. Discovering this world has been fascinating, and I hope I have shown it fairly.


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